The Trouble-Makers

Celia Fremlin was born in Kingsbury, Middlesex, on 20 June 1914, to Heaver and Margaret Fremlin. Her father was a doctor, and she spent her childhood in Hertfordshire before going on to study at Oxford. Between 1958 and 1994 she published sixteen novels of suspense and three collections of stories, highly acclaimed in their day. Sadly, Fremlin’s work had largely fallen out of print by the time I discovered her for myself in the mid-1990s. But I was captivated by the elegant, razor-sharp quality of her writing and – as often when one finds an author one is passionate about – keen to learn more about the writer’s life. Then, in early 2005, I had the great good fortune of having several conversations with Celia Fremlin’s elder daughter Geraldine Goller. Geraldine was a charming woman and I found our discussions enlightening, helping me to understand Celia Fremlin better and to appreciate why she wrote the kind of books she did.

One noteworthy thing I gathered from Geraldine was that her mother (highly academic as a young woman, even before she found her vocation in fiction) was invariably to be found immersed in her latest writing project – to the exclusion, at times, of her family. Geraldine also told me that her mother was notorious within the home for embroidering the truth, and was quite often caught out by her family for telling ‘little white lies’. Geraldine, however, read no badness into this trait: she simply put it down to her mother’s creative streak, her ability to fabricate new identities for people – even for herself.

Who, then, was the real Celia Fremlin? The short biographies in her books tended to state that she was born in Ryarsh, Kent. Geraldine, however, informed me that her mother was raised in Hertfordshire, where – we know for a fact – she was admitted to Berkhamsted School for Girls in 1923; she studied there until 1933. Ryarsh, then, was perhaps one of those minor fabrications on Fremlin’s part. As a fan of hers, was I perturbed by the idea that Fremlin may have practised deceit? Not at all – if anything, it made the author and her works
appear even more attractive and labyrinthine. Here was a middle-class woman who seemed to delight in re-inventing herself; and while all writers draw upon their own experiences to some extent, ‘reinvention’ is the key to any artist’s longevity. I can imagine it must have been maddening to live with, but it does suggest Fremlin had a mischievous streak, evident too in her writing. And Fremlin is hardly alone in this habit, even among writers: haven’t we all, at one time or another, ‘embellished’ some part of our lives to make us sound more interesting?

Even as a girl, Celia Fremlin wrote keenly: a talent perhaps inherited from her mother, Margaret, who had herself enjoyed writing plays. By the age of thirteen Celia was publishing poems in the
Chronicle of the Berkhamsted School for Girls,
and in 1930 she was awarded the school’s Lady Cooper Prize for ‘Best Original Poem’, her entry entitled, ‘When the World Has Grown Cold’ (which could easily have served for one of her later short stories). In her final year at Berkhamsted she became President of the school’s inaugural Literary and Debating Society.

She went on to study Classics at Somerville College, Oxford, graduating with a second. Not one to rest on her laurels, she worked concurrently as a charwoman. This youthful experience provided a fascinating lesson for her in studying the class system from different perspectives, and led to her publishing her first non-fiction book,
The Seven Chars of Chelsea
, in 1940. During the war Fremlin served as an air-raid warden and also became involved in the now celebrated Mass Observation project of popular anthropology, founded in 1937 by Tom Harrisson, Charles Madge and Humphrey Jennings, and committed to the study of the everyday lives of ordinary people. Fremlin collaborated with Tom Harrisson on the book
War Factory
(1943), recording the experiences and attitudes of women war workers in a factory outside Malmesbury, Wiltshire, which specialised in making radar equipment.

In 1942, Fremlin married Elia Goller: they would have three children, Nicholas, Geraldine and Sylvia. According to Geraldine, the newlyweds moved to Hampstead, into a
‘tall, old house overlooking the Heath itself’, and this was where Geraldine and her siblings grew up. Fremlin was by now developing her fiction writing, and she submitted a number of short stories to the likes of
Women’s Own, Punch
and the
London Mystery Magazine.
However she had to endure a fair number of rejections before, finally, her debut novel was accepted. In a preface to a later Pandora edition of said novel Fremlin wrote:

The baby who bore unknowing witness to Fremlin’s epiphany was, of course, Geraldine. It would be some years before Fremlin could actually put pen to paper on this project, but the resulting novel,
The Hours Before Dawn
(1959), went on to win the Edgar Award for Best Crime Novel from the Mystery Writers of America, and remains Fremlin’s most famous work.

Thereafter Fremlin wrote at a steady pace, publishing
Uncle Paul
in 1960 and
Seven Lean Years
in 1961. Those first three novels have been classed as ‘tales of menace’, even ‘domestic suspense’. Fremlin took the everyday as her subject and yet, by introducing an atmosphere of unease, she made it extraordinary, fraught with danger. She succeeded in chilling and thrilling her readers without spilling so much as a drop of blood. However, there
is a persistent threat of harm that pervades Fremlin’s writing and she excels at creating a claustrophobic tension in ‘normal’ households. This scenario was her métier and one she revisited in many novels. Fremlin once commented that her favourite pastimes were gossip, ‘talking shop’ and any kind of argument about anything. We might suppose that it was through these enthusiasms that she gleaned the ideas that grew into her books. Reading them it is clear that the mundane minutiae of domesticity fascinated her. Moreover,
The Hours Before Dawn
and
The Trouble-Makers
have a special concern with the societal/peer-group systems that adjudge whether or not a woman is rated a ‘good wife’ and ‘good mother.’

*

By 1968 Celia Fremlin had established herself as a published author. But this was to be a year for the Goller family in which tragedy followed hard upon tragedy. Their youngest daughter Sylvia committed suicide, aged nineteen. A month later Fremlin’s husband Elia killed himself. In the wake of these catastrophes Fremlin relocated to Geneva for a year.

In 1969 she published a novel entitled
Possession
. The manuscript had been delivered to Gollancz before the terrible events of 1968, but knowing of those circumstances in approaching
Possession
today makes for chilling reading, since incidents in the novel appear to mirror Fremlin’s life at that time. It is one of her most absorbing and terrifying productions. Aside from the short-story collection
Don’t Go to Sleep in the Dark
(1970) Fremlin did not publish again until
Appointment With Yesterday
(1972), subsequently a popular title amongst her body of work. The novel deals with a woman who has changed her identity: a recurrent theme, and one with which Fremlin may have identified most acutely in the aftermath of her terrible dual bereavements.
The Long Shadow
(1975) makes use of the knowledge of the Classics she acquired at Oxford; its main character, Imogen, is newly widowed. Again, we might suppose this was Fremlin’s way of processing, through fictions, the trials she had suffered in her own life.

Fremlin lived on in Hampstead and married her second husband, Leslie Minchin, in 1985. The couple remained together until his death in 1999. She collaborated with Minchin on a book of poetry called
Duet in Verse
which appeared in 1996. Her last published novel was
King of the World
(1994). Geraldine believed that her mother’s earlier work was her best, but I feel that this final novel, too, has its merits. Fremlin marvellously describes a woman who has been transformed from a dowdy, put-upon frump to an attractive woman of stature. The reason Fremlin gives for this seems to me revealing: ‘Disaster itself, of course. However much a disaster sweeps away, it also inevitably leaves a slate clean.’

Though Geraldine did not admit as much to me, she did allude to having had a somewhat mixed relationship with her mother. This, in a way, explained to me the recurrence of the theme of mother–daughter relations explored in many of Fremlin’s novels, from
Uncle Paul, Prisoner’s Base
and
Possession
right up to her penultimate novel
The Echoing Stones
(1993). One wonders whether Fremlin hoped that the fictional exploration of this theme might help her to attain a better understanding of it in life. Thankfully, as they got older and Celia moved to Bristol to be nearer Geraldine, both women managed finally to find some common ground and discovered a mutual respect for each other. Celia Fremlin was, in the end, pre-deceased by all three of her children. She died herself in 2009.

To revisit the Celia Fremlin
oeuvre
now is to see authentic snapshots of how people lived at the time of her writing: how they interacted, what values they held. Note how finely Fremlin denotes the relations between child and adult, husband and wife, woman and woman. Every interaction between her characters has a core of truth and should strike a resonant note in any reader. Look carefully for the minute gestures that can have devastating consequences. Watch as the four walls of your comforting home can be turned into walls of a prison. Above all, enjoy feeling unsettled as Fremlin’s words push down on you, making you feel just as claustrophobic as her characters as they confront their fates. Fremlin was a superb writer who has always enjoyed a core of diehard fans and yet, despite her Edgar Award success, was not to achieve the readership she deserved. As Faber Finds now reissue her complete works, now is the time to correct that.

*

In the course of my discussions with Geraldine, a striking moment occurred just after I volunteered to her that
The Trouble-Makers
was my favourite book of her mother’s. A short silence ensued. Geraldine let out a slight ‘Ahh …’ followed by, ‘That’s very interesting …’ I was bound to ask her to develop that thought, and she was kind enough to expand.

‘Whenever anyone mentioned
The Trouble-Makers
,’ she explained, ‘my mother would go silent. She would be happy to talk about any of her books, but if anyone – even her family – mentioned that one, then Mother would refuse to talk about it.’

Since her mother stuck to this code of silence Geraldine couldn’t say quite why she was so adamant; however, she had a feeling that the subject matter of
The Trouble-Makers
struck too close to home. Gossip, after all, was one of Celia Fremlin’s pet pastimes, rather like her fondness for ‘little white lies’. But did she ever get ‘burned’, as it were, by a piece of gossip? Did she perhaps feel that she had gone too far inside the homes and heads of her neighbours? Might she have betrayed a secret told to her in confidence? Geraldine could only guess, but it was possible
The Trouble-Makers
was a kind of mirror that reflected more of its author than she had wished.

The novel was published in 1963, a time of suburban building developments and new towns, when families were promised a new life and moved to live cheek by jowl with strangers similarly on the hunt for better surroundings in which to bring up their children. But these places could become battlegrounds, rife with emotion and conflict, as people found new friends and comrades but also gossiped about those who either didn’t fit in or were felt not to be pulling their weight on the domestic front.

The Trouble-Makers
interrogates the idea of being ‘the perfect mother’, ‘the perfect wife’, managing the cleanest and most perfectly run house in the street: a task of Herculean proportions, but one that many women of that era strained to accomplish. This novel is about women forced to ditch their dreams as they deal with the harsh reality of raising a family on a shoestring. (There is a marvellous moment when Katharine has to use potatoes to make the stew last that little bit longer, so that it can feed sufficient mouths.) Fremlin also swings a spotlight superbly on to the pecking order that arises among women whose sense of superiority depends on their display of capability as a mother.

At the beginning of
The Trouble-Makers
you can see Fremlin’s wonderfully observant eye in her description of Katharine at the bus stop, looking over her fellow travellers. In the ‘no-man’s land’ that is the rush hour, Katharine can ‘worry in peace’. As she shuffles along the queue she makes up personal histories for her fellow travellers. When one of them catches Katharine staring, it nearly causes her to shout out loud that she is content, to deny that she and her husband are unhappy. The moment is only temporary. Or is it?

This, Celia Fremlin’s fourth novel, was the first to involve a murder. But the perpetrator of the crime is not someone ‘acting alone’ in the usual culpable sense. Fremlin shows us that a wider social group has its cross to bear. The theme of a whole community being complicit in the destruction of an individual, because of an oppressive demand for ‘perfection’, is one so disturbing that it may account in part for Fremlin’s subsequent reluctance to discuss
The Trouble-Makers
with anyone.